The 6-Hour Road Trip Rule: Why I Don't Spend My Vacation Driving

The destination matters. But so does how you feel when you get there.

I've reached the point where I don't want to spend an entire day of my vacation staring through a windshield.

I like road trips. I like the freedom of having our own car, discovering places along the way and being able to change plans when something interesting appears.

What I don't particularly enjoy is leaving before sunrise, driving for ten or eleven hours, eating lunch in the car and finally stumbling into a hotel exhausted because we're trying to get somewhere as quickly as possible.

At some point, I realized something:

The drive is part of the vacation too.

So I've adopted what I call my 6-Hour Road Trip Rule.

Whenever possible, I plan for no more than about six hours of actual driving in a day.

It's not a rigid rule. Sometimes geography or circumstances make a longer day unavoidable.

But six hours is my target.

And it has changed the way I think about road trips.

Six Hours of Driving Doesn't Mean a Six-Hour Day

This distinction matters.

If Google Maps says your destination is six hours away, you're probably not going to arrive six hours after you leave.

And that's okay.

We usually stop about every two hours.

Sometimes there's something worth seeing. Sometimes there isn't.

It doesn't matter.

Get out of the car.

Use the restroom. Stretch your legs. Get a cup of coffee. Walk around for ten minutes. Fill the gas tank. Switch drivers.

Then get back on the road.

A six-hour driving day may turn into seven or eight hours from hotel to hotel, but those hours feel very different from eight straight hours in the car.

Instead of one long endurance test, the day becomes several manageable pieces.

You Don't Need an Attraction to Justify a Stop

I think we sometimes make road-trip planning more complicated than it needs to be.

Every stop doesn't have to be Mount Rushmore.

You don't need a museum, national monument or famous restaurant every two hours.

Sometimes a perfectly good stop is a pleasant town with a coffee shop.

Or a park where you can walk for fifteen minutes.

Or a scenic overlook.

Or an interesting store.

Or even a clean rest area with picnic tables and a little room to move around.

The point isn't necessarily to see something.

The point is to stop driving for a while.

And occasionally those unimportant stops become surprisingly memorable.

If There Are Two Drivers, Use Them

Even if one person normally does most of the driving, a road trip is a good time to share it when possible.

Switching drivers every couple of hours gives the person behind the wheel a real break.

And being the passenger for a while means you can actually look around.

You notice the landscape changing.

You can look up an interesting town you just passed.

You can figure out where you might want lunch.

Or you can do absolutely nothing for an hour.

That's allowed too.

The goal isn't to maximize everyone's productivity.

We're on vacation.

Plan the Hotel as Part of the Trip

I used to think of an overnight hotel on a road trip mostly as a place to sleep.

Now I pay more attention to what the hotel gives me besides a bed.

Is breakfast included?

Is there a refrigerator?

Can we easily walk somewhere for dinner?

Is there a restaurant nearby?

And here's one that can make a surprisingly big difference:

Does the hotel have an evening reception or happy hour?

Some hotel brands offer complimentary evening food and drinks. For example, Embassy Suites advertises a nightly Evening Reception with complimentary drinks and light appetizers, while Drury Hotels offers its 5:30 Kickback with complimentary dinnertime food and beverages. Offerings vary, so it's worth checking the particular hotel before counting on it.

That can be more useful than it sounds.

After six hours of driving, I don't necessarily want to get back into the car and drive somewhere else for dinner.

Sometimes we can check in, unpack, go downstairs, have something to eat and drink and call it a day.

Depending on what's offered, we may still want dinner afterward. But sometimes the evening food is enough—or enough that a later meal can be very light.

Either way, it can save money and make the evening much easier.

I now consider things like breakfast, parking, evening food and location when comparing hotel prices rather than looking only at the nightly rate.

A hotel that's $15 cheaper isn't necessarily cheaper if we're buying breakfast the next morning and dinner the night before.

Don't Let an Itinerary Bully You

This may be my most important road-trip rule.

Just because an attraction is somewhere in the general vicinity does not mean you have to go there.

It's very easy to start planning a trip and think:

Well, we're already going this far. We might as well add this.

And then:

If we're going there, this other place is only a few hours away.

Pretty soon your relaxing road trip looks like a military operation.

I've learned to look at the map and ask:

Do I actually want to see this enough to justify the driving it adds?

If the answer is no, take it off the itinerary.

You don't get a prize for visiting the greatest number of places.

Don't Automatically Take the Fastest Route

Navigation apps are designed to get us somewhere efficiently.

That's useful.

But efficiency isn't always the goal of a vacation.

If one route takes five hours and forty minutes and another takes six hours but passes through an interesting town, follows a scenic highway or gives us a better place to stop for lunch, I may choose the six-hour route.

That extra twenty minutes might make the entire day better.

Of course, there's a limit. I'm not adding three hours just because there's a giant ball of twine somewhere.

Although I admit I'd probably consider it.

Lunch Can Be Part of the Stop

I also try not to treat lunch as a problem that needs to be solved as quickly as possible.

Sometimes fast food is exactly what makes sense.

But if we're stopping anyway, why not see whether there's a good local diner, café, bakery or interesting restaurant nearby?

It gives us a longer break from the car and lets us experience a place we otherwise would have driven straight through.

And if there's nothing interesting around?

That's fine too.

A sandwich at a picnic table can be a very good road-trip lunch.

Stay Two Nights Sometimes

One of the easiest ways to make a road trip exhausting is to pack up every single morning.

Drive.

Check in.

Unpack.

Sleep.

Pack.

Repeat.

If there's a place we actually want to explore, I like building in an occasional two-night stay.

Suddenly there's an entire day when we don't have to load the car.

We can sleep a little later, explore, have a leisurely dinner and come back to a room that's already ours.

That one extra night can change the rhythm of the whole trip.

Leave Room for Something You Didn't Plan

This is another reason I don't want ten-hour driving days.

There's no room for anything unexpected.

If we see a sign for an interesting overlook, we can stop.

If we discover a small museum, we have time.

If a town looks interesting, we can drive through it.

If we happen across a yarn store...

Well, obviously we have to investigate.

A road trip shouldn't be so tightly scheduled that a thirty-minute detour feels like a crisis.

The Trip Home Counts Too

This is where it's tempting to abandon the whole philosophy.

Vacation is over.

Home is that direction.

Let's just drive.

But an eleven-hour marathon on the last day can undo a surprising amount of the relaxation that came before it.

So I try to apply the same rule on the way home.

Keep the driving manageable.

Stop.

Eat.

Stretch.

Stay overnight if we need to.

I'd rather arrive home the next afternoon feeling reasonably human than stumble through the door at midnight and need a day to recover from my vacation.

More Freedom Means We Can Travel Differently

For many years, vacation travel was dictated by one thing:

How much can we fit into the limited time we have off?

That's understandable when you have a job to get back to Monday morning, children who need to be in school or a limited number of vacation days.

But one of the possibilities of our freedom years is that those constraints may begin to loosen.

Maybe we can travel on Tuesday instead of Saturday.

Maybe we can take eight days instead of seven.

Maybe we can stay somewhere an extra night because we're enjoying ourselves.

Maybe we don't need to drive 700 miles in one day anymore.

That doesn't mean every trip needs to be slow.

It means we get to decide.

And increasingly, my decision is this:

Six hours is enough.

I'd rather arrive early enough to unpack, have something to eat, relax and still feel like I'm on vacation.

Because the point of a road trip isn't how many miles we can put on the odometer.

It's what we get to experience along the way.